The Flight of Gemma Hardy (24 page)

“Whatever you did or didn't do for Alison,” I said, “you have a second chance with her daughter. Nell can be happy, she can do the things she wants to do.”

“She can,” he said gently. “All I'm saying, Gemma, is please don't put me on a pedestal. I'll have farther to fall. I own Blackbird Hall and you work here, but it could easily be the other way round. When I saw you this morning, standing up to Seamus, not caring that he was twice your size, I knew you were braver than I could ever be.”

I started to protest—I hadn't been brave; I'd been angry—but he interrupted. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you that I had to go back to London. I'm forty-one years old and I've got used to doing what I please, not consulting anyone, but I never meant to take you for granted.”

“I forgive you,” I said and, miraculously, I did. The hard rock of anger that had stood between us since I saw him sitting on the bench under the trees rolled away.

He kissed me and slipped his hand down the front of my nightdress. I still had limbs, organs, feet, eyes, but the only part of my body I could feel was the few square inches where his hand pressed against my skin. I willed him to go on but suddenly he grew still; his hand was gone.

“No,” he said. “This is going to be different, totally different.”

He lifted me off his lap to one side of the chair, stood up, and walked to the fireplace, the window, the door, the window again. “I feel,” he said, “like I'm about to jump out of a plane.”

He stopped walking and stood before me. “Sweet girl. How I wish I was your age and knew what I know now. You must go back to bed. I promise there'll be no more coming and going without consulting you.”

“And no more lies?” I said. “About money, or what you're doing, or anything else.”

“And no more lies,” he agreed. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

As I made my way down the corridor I saw a light on in the downstairs hall. From the kitchen came the faint clink of metal and china. Some other nocturnal wanderer—Vicky? Seamus?—was making a cup of tea.

chapter twenty-three

T
he next morning the calves ate and stood without trembling. We had lessons as usual, and again I carried our lunch to the schoolroom; Seamus needed not to see me for a few days. After we ate, I was reading to Nell from
Anne of Green Gables
when Mr. Sinclair put his head round the door. Might he have the honour of our company? We could go to Stromness to explore the harbour and find a tearoom.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Nell.

“Does that suit you, Miss Hardy?” He made a little bow.

“I'd be delighted, Mr. Sinclair.” I bowed in turn. “And if I could steal ten minutes to do some shopping that would be super.”

And that was the pattern of the days that followed. Mr. Sinclair did whatever he did in the morning, the afternoons were devoted to Nell, and in the evenings, after dinner, we went for a walk or I tiptoed down the corridor to his sitting-room. Several times I caught Vicky looking at me askance, and I longed to explain, but I had no words for what was happening, for those long nightly conversations in which I told him about my aunt and Miriam and life at Claypoole and he told me about studying at Oxford; the three years he had worked in Paris; his life in London. Our conversations included many other topics, momentous and trivial: Were those stout leather buttons on men's cardigans attractive? Did animals have souls? What was the perfect picnic? Were men and women essentially different? Who invented the fork? Which was better: a reef knot or a bowline? I told him about Miss Seftain's interest in space travel and the names and fates of the various dogs, mostly mongrels, who had orbited the earth: Belka, the squirrel, Strelka, the arrow. He told me about diving among the wrecks at Scapa Flow and seeing the stateroom of one of the German ships. We talked, it seemed, about everything. And night after night these conversations ended in passionate kisses from which, eventually, we separated. Then one evening as Vicky left for her choir practise she announced that Mr. Sinclair had spent most of the day on the phone.

“He'll be off again soon,” she said. “Mark my words.”

That night when I knocked on the door to his rooms there was no answer. He was not in the library, nor the billiard room, nor his study, nor the garden. I had never known him to go to the farm so late. And surely, I thought, he would not have gone down to the sea without me. At last I returned to his door and knocked again, a brisk, bold rap that belied my feelings. As I stood staring at the swirling grain of the wood, I remembered standing outside Miss Bryant's study, watching my tiny self in the brass doorknob, waiting to cross the blue carpet and be chastised. Then the door opened and Mr. Sinclair was looking down at me, his eyebrows drawn, his forehead furrowed. Behind him, from his sitting-room, came a burst of furious music.

“Gemma, what's the matter?”

“Where were you? You disappeared.”

“No, I didn't. Here I am.” He drew me inside. In the sitting-room, he turned down the record player and poured me a glass of red wine. First a drink, he said. Then I must tell him what was wrong. I had only tried wine a few times and did not care for the taste. Now I drank it as if it were medicine and blurted out Vicky's claim.

Mr. Sinclair nodded. “She's right,” he said, his voice as calm as if we were discussing his choice of shirt. “I can't do all my work by mail and phone.”

“But”—I stared at the beautiful red and blue rug, trying to keep the fleur-de-lys pattern in focus—“what about me?” If I was about to lose everything, then what did I have to lose by asking the ultimate question?

“Gemma, I need to earn a living. I can't stay here and I can't take you to London as things are now.”

“So what can we do? Is there nothing to be done?” The fleur-de-lys blurred. Everyone, I thought, slips through my fingers.

I could feel Mr. Sinclair's eyes searching my face. Neither of us spoke for what seemed like a long time. “There is one thing we can do,” he said slowly. Then he uttered a four-word question that I had read in dozens of books but which neither of us, in all our conversations, had ever mentioned. The words scattered to the corners of the glowing room. Once again I pictured the two of us from the point of view of a lark, standing in this room, in this house, surrounded by the farm, the island, the incessant sea.

He knelt at my feet. “Will you?” he said again. His eyes, looking up at me rather than down, were boat-shaped. I allowed myself to sail in them towards the edge of the known world.

I set down the empty wine-glass. “On one condition,” I said. “Actually two.”

“Two!” His teeth gleamed in the light. “She drives a hard bargain.”

I held up my fingers. “One, I get to go to university. I have to pass the exams, but if I pass, then I get to go.”

“I'll even help you study, but no going off to a hall of residence. You have to live with me.” His dark eyelashes fluttered. “And what is two on this dreadful list?”

“Nell won't be sent away to boarding school, unless she wants to go.”

“Gemma. How could your parents have known that you would turn out to be like your name?”

“They didn't. Gemma was my uncle's choice. My parents gave me another name.” I reached down to help him to his feet.

“What is it?”

The name was there, waiting, but everyone who had ever known it was dead. “I'll tell you,” I said, “the night we're married.”

I expected him to argue, but an expression akin to relief came over his face. “I'll tell you my secrets then too. I have done things I'm not proud of, that might make you like me less.”

I thought of Coco and of all the women who had surely come before her; he had told me about some of them: a secretary named Lydia, a debutante named Henrietta. I thought of what Nora had said about how he used to be a hellion, of the ways he had failed his sister and his parents. And I offered the words Miriam had drilled into me that first Easter when she was helping me catch up with my lessons.

“ ‘Love is not love,' ” I repeated, “ ‘which alters when it alteration finds, or bends . . .' ” But the next line was gone; even conjuring up Mrs. Harris's beady gaze did not bring it back.

“Something about tempests, I think,” said Mr. Sinclair. “So there is nothing that could change your feelings for me? Swear to me that is so, Gemma.”

Looking at the face I had first glimpsed by the light of a torch and was now licenced to look at freely, I saw emotions that I couldn't name. Just for a moment I pictured the boy in the raspberry canes, bending over Drummond with a tortured expression. But the boy was a stranger; why should I understand his feelings? Now I had to believe that what drew Mr. Sinclair's mouth tight, what darkened his eyes, was some mysterious aspect of adult affection that I would soon understand.

“I swear,” I said, “but you must swear too. I've done things which I regret.”

“Sweet girl, what on earth could you have done that you regret?”

“Don't treat me like a child. I may be younger than you, but that doesn't mean I don't have a past, haven't made mistakes.”

He began to promise that he would never again treat me like a child but I interrupted. “You'll break your promise a hundred times. Please swear the one thing I want. That you won't allow anything, any secret, to change your feelings for me.”

“I will,” he said, “be constant as the northern star.”

It was the most felicitous of oaths. I told him then about my parents and how they had survived their long engagement by looking at the North Star, the one thing, despite the eight hundred miles between Scotland and Iceland, that they reliably had in common. When I finished, he told me about a day during his boyhood when he and Alison had been playing on the beach. Suddenly half-a-dozen rocks had come whistling out of the sky.

“We thought the Germans were coming, but we carried home a couple of the smaller pieces and our father explained that what we'd seen was a meteorite falling.” From the mantelpiece he retrieved a piece of dull black rock the size of his thumb. When he laid it in my palm it turned out to be unexpectedly heavy. “A token of my affection,” he said, “until I can give you a ring.”

Then he asked if there was anyone whose permission he should ask. Briefly I thought of Miss Seftain and how she had teased me about marriage as we walked across the frozen grass. “No,” I said.

“So there are no obstacles,” he said jubilantly.

He picked me up and kissed me and I stopped thinking about rugs, or stars, or larks, or anything except my body measured by his.

S
ave for the strangely heavy rock under my pillow, the next day everything seemed just the same: breakfast, hens, calves, lessons, lunch, a walk, reading. After tea, however, when I was labelling her drawings, Nell skipped into the schoolroom and said Uncle Hugh wanted us in the library. I brought a book, thinking he might ask her to read. But as soon as I saw Vicky, seated in an armchair, knitting, I knew that once again we were standing on the cliff top. It had not occurred to me that our nocturnal conversation would bring changes so soon. Don't say anything, I wanted to say.

Was it my thoughts or his own doubts that made Mr. Sinclair move his feet awkwardly, lean one way and then the other, push back his hair and look out of the window before turning to face three women whose combined ages totaled a little more than fifty? Just for an instant, I cherished the hope that he was about to propose an outing to Kirkwall or agree that Nell could, at last, have piano lessons.

“I want you both to know, to be the first to know”—his eyes flickered towards one bookshelf, then another—“that Gemma and I are going to be married.”

Nell flung her arms around me. “Hurrah. I'll have an aunt.”

As we embraced, I saw Vicky's ball of red wool rolling away across the floor. She was looking at me wide-eyed, one hand pressed to her chest, as if to still the inner turmoil, but by the time Nell had stopped jumping up and down she was on her feet, ready to shake hands with Mr. Sinclair and kiss my cheek. “I do congratulate you both,” she said. He too, I saw, had registered her coolness; indeed, he had expected it. How could his twenty-seven-year-old housekeeper be expected to welcome the news that he was marrying his eighteen-year-old au pair?

“When are you getting married?” clamoured Nell. “Can I be a bridesmaid?”

“No—there won't be any bridesmaids.”

“What about a cake? A white cake with a bride and groom on top.”

“No,” Mr. Sinclair said again. “We're not going to make a fuss.”

Vicky stood up and announced that she had a pie in the oven. I stood too and told Nell we must tidy the schoolroom before supper.

“Wait,” said Mr. Sinclair. “We have to talk.”

“We can talk later, after Nell's in bed. Or you can help tidy the schoolroom.” I held out my hand to Nell.

“But you'll have dinner with me?”

“Nell has supper in half an hour. I eat with her.”

“We're engaged,” he said. “Surely that makes a difference?”

“As little as possible, if I have any say, which the last ten minutes suggest I don't.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair. “We're having our first quarrel. I'm sorry. I should have asked you before I told Vicky and Nell.”

“You should have.” Hand in hand with Nell, I left the room.

Later that night, after she was asleep, we sat together in the library. Now that our relationship was public, there was no reason to hide away in his room. Vicky, I knew, was safely visiting friends, and Seamus was out wandering the fields, or bowed over his mantelpiece, but I left the door ajar, a signal that everything was above-board. Mr. Sinclair apologised again.

“I'm sorry. I'm just so used to being in charge.” Then he added that he had applied for a wedding licence. We would be married in the registry office in Kirkwall next week.

“Next week?” I exclaimed. “Besides, I thought we'd be married in a church.”

“I'm sorry, Gemma. If your uncle were alive that would be different, but I don't want to lose one more day. If you like we can be married again in a church. People quite often have two ceremonies.”

His eyes were glowing and I said yes to everything, agreed to everything, even though a part of me still wanted nothing to change, or to change more slowly. But it was too late for that. We had jumped off one cliff, and when we were married, there would be another cliff to fall over, farther, faster.

T
he next morning Vicky behaved as if the previous day's conversation had never occurred—the weather was awful; would I be sure to give the hens more shells—but I caught her studying my waistline. Before I came to lunch, I took off my pullover and tightened the belt on my trousers. I was not one of those sudden girls, like Mrs. Marsden.

For all her silence to me, I soon discovered that Vicky had spread the word. When I ran into Nora, polishing the piano in the hall, she dropped the duster and seized my hands.

“I can't believe it, I can't believe it,” she said. “You and Mr. Sinclair getting married. What a slyboots you are. Who'd have thought of him marrying one of us? It's like something out of a fairy tale. Todd will be on the floor when I tell him.”

“Thank you,” I said, uncertainly.

“Oh, I'm forgetting myself.” She swung our hands, smiling. “Congratulations. I hope you'll be very happy and not forget your old friends.”

“Of course I won't.” But even as I spoke, I knew that my days of playing games in Nora's living-room were over.

Her smile fading, she released my hands. “The thing I can't help wondering, Gemma, is do you really love him? Money isn't everything, and he's so much older. Won't you miss having fun?”

How could so few sentences contain so many insults? Last week I would have told her it was none of her business; did she really love her gullible fiancé? Now, as the future Mrs. Sinclair, I did my best to conceal my anger. “I think we'll suit each other fine,” I said, handing her the fallen duster and hurrying away.